Last fight of the Proms! 'Seat holders' at Royal Albert Hall sue venue for £500,000 after 'missing out on concerts'
Roughly a quarter of the venue's 5,272 seats were sold on a 999-year lease to individual buyers to fund the hall's construction, in 1866.
Owners pay an annual seat rate, with many seats passed down from generation to generation.
Under current arrangements, for around 100 designated events each year, known as 'executive lettings', the owners give up their 1,268 seats for the west London venue to sell.
But Arthur George, 78, who owns 12 seats in two separate boxes, and father and son William and Alexander Stockler, who together own four seats in one box, say they have been excluded from more performances than rules allow by the Corporation of the Hall of Arts and Sciences, commonly known as the Royal Albert Hall (RAH).
Lawyers for the three men are asking a judge to declare that the practice of excluding them from other performances is unlawful, and to grant an injunction to stop the corporation from restricting their access beyond the terms of the Royal Albert Hall Act 1966.
The lawyers told the High Court yesterday that seat holders have a 'proprietary right to use their seats, or to otherwise sell or give away their tickets'.
The men are asking a judge to rule in their favour without a trial and award an interim payment of £500,000 in damages, ahead of the full amount being decided. The corporation is opposing the application, with its lawyers stating the case should proceed to trial.
They told a hearing in London that the body has excluded members on other occasions, but this has been approved by members by way of a document titled Memorandum and Guidelines.
David Satwell, representing the three claimants, told the court: 'This isn't a breach of contract case, we say this is a wrongful use of someone else's property.'
In written submissions, Mr Satwell said: 'It is not disputed by the parties that the corporation has exceeded its power... by granting more exclusive lets than it is permitted to do under that provision, that it has been doing so for a number of years, and that it intends to do so into the future.'
For the corporation, Simon Taube KC wrote: 'The claimants, who have each been members of the corporation since before 2008, appear not to have voted against the Memorandum and Guidelines until the 2023 AGM.'
In 2017, Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe paid £2.76 million for a box at the venue, which famously stages the BBC Proms, as well as rock concerts and awards nights.
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The combination of material ostentation, health micromanagement and exclusive cultural opportunities required by the very wealthy these days will be provided by a formerly American hospitality chain, now owned by a conglomerate based in Hong Kong. The building itself is owned by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. As so often in Britain, the ambition of some non-western countries to reverse their relationship with the old imperial powers is hiding in plain sight. Enclaves for ultra-wealthy guests are proliferating across a widening swathe of central London. Some of these hotels, such as Raffles London at the OWO (Old War Office) and the Waldorf Astoria London Admiralty Arch, follow a similar formula to the Chancery. Famous, well-located properties sold off by the state – the Old War Office and Admiralty Arch disposed of during the deep spending cuts by David Cameron's government – are having their history and faded grandeur commodified into something glitzier. By its final years, parts of the Grosvenor Square embassy were actually quite shabby, with worn carpets and frayed office furniture. Maintaining large government premises in expensive city-centre locations, exposed to protests or potential terrorist attack, can ultimately become unappealing for the state, not least because its revenues are limited by the reluctance of many of the 1% to pay their taxes. So the London boom in luxurious office-to-hotel conversions may have been partly prompted, in an indirect way, by the self-interest of some of those who now stay in them. As so often in the 21st century, the behaviour of the 1% feels impervious to satire or condemnation. Fifty-seven years ago, at the height of protests against the Vietnam war, Grosvenor Square filled with demonstrators, among them the leading activist Tariq Ali. In his memoir of the 1960s, Street Fighting Years, he recalls that he and his more excitable comrades 'dreamed' of forcing their way into the building, and 'using the embassy telex to cable the US embassy in Saigon and inform them that pro-Vietcong forces had seized the premises in Grosvenor Square'. Only mounted police charges and mass arrests saved the London embassy from invasion. Yet now luxury capitalism has managed to do what protesters could not, and take over the building from the spooks and diplomats. With Donald Trump transparently running the US for the benefit of the rich, it feels fitting that the building has become a place for them, rather than Americans in general. The hotel will be open just in time for his September state visit. Perhaps some of his wealthier supporters will take the opportunity to stay. For any guest who worries about the potential provocation of yet another elite hotel, operating at a traditional protest site, in a country in which most people are struggling with a seemingly endless cost of living crisis, the Chancery does have some discreet security. Cameras cover the hotel's perimeter, and guards circle the building after dark. Meanwhile a couple of miles to the south, in a new London landscape of residential towers and windswept roads at Nine Elms, the successor to the Grosvenor Square embassy stands in the middle of its own, far more extensive security zone, including a partial moat and a defensive wall disguised as a waterfall. The huge pale cube of the current US embassy dominates its neighbourhood even more than its predecessor did. It's also much further away from the usual routes of London political marches. Some protesters have already adjusted. Thousands of people supporting Palestine walked to the embassy in February, to show their fury at Trump's backing for Israel. The symbolic contrast between their defiant flags and flimsy placards and the fortress-like building did not work in the US's favour. The Grosvenor Square embassy may be gone, but the business of challenging the US goes on. Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
